Paul Rudolph’s Manhattan Megastructure

I’m not sure there has ever been an architect whose work was as seductive, as beautiful, as exhilarating, and as downright frightening as Paul Rudolph’s. Rudolph, who died in 1997, was best known for the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, an extraordinary composition in concrete and glass that, when it was finished in 1963, was on the cover of every architecture magazine—the Bilbao of its time, you might say. Then everyone decided it was too brutal, too harsh, and it fell out of favor, only to be exquisitely restored in 2008 by Charles Gwathmey and renamed Paul Rudolph Hall, the ultimate redemption for an architect whose career had gone into eclipse. Rudolph’s inventively spare modernist houses in Florida have also come back into fashion lately, and there has been something of a Rudolph revival.

It’s hard to say what the exhibition “Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway,” on view until November 20th at Cooper Union and sponsored by the Drawing Center, will do to Rudolph’s reputation. Back in 1967, Rudolph was commissioned by the Ford Foundation to study the implications of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Robert Moses’s project for a Y-shaped highway that would have tied the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. The expressway would have destroyed much of what we now know as SoHo and Tribeca, which could not have evolved as they did had the highway been built. I am not sure it is possible to find anyone who regrets that this project never happened. (It was finally cancelled officially in 1971, after years of debate.) In 1967, presuming that the expressway was a done deal, Rudolph didn’t oppose it in the manner of Jane Jacobs, whose argument that it would have brought far more urban destruction than urban renewal ultimately carried the day. Instead, he took on the challenge of figuring out how to mitigate the highway’s impact on the city, and turn this incursion into something positive.

Rudolph’s idea, in effect, was to double down on the intervention, to build so much around and atop and beside it that the expressway would seem almost irrelevant. Rudolph envisioned what was, in effect, a megastructure extending all the way across Manhattan—a whole series of buildings that stretched, nearly unbroken, from river to river. Some of them straddled the expressway, others were towers arranged in clusters, and still others were in the form of slabs that Rudolph placed along the approaches to both bridges, turning them into walled corridors. He designed many of the buildings as gigantic frames to hold prefabricated apartment units that were to have been slipped into the structures. There were “people movers,” gliding along tracks connecting the buildings, and several floors of open automobile storage at the base of many of the apartment towers.

It was ridiculous in some ways, a futuristic city of the absurd. It ignored the streets, the lifeblood of New York’s urbanism, in favor what seems today like a brave new world of anti-urbanism. Rudolph himself saw this not as anti-urban, and contrasted his approach with that of Le Corbusier, who wanted to level the existing city and erect vast towers in open space. “This plan, unlike most, does not propose to tear down everything in sight; it suggests that we tear down as little as possible,” Rudolph said, in a remark that, while true, was disingenuous, since he was hardly leaving the city alone. Indeed, he was proposing an intervention far more massive than anything Robert Moses ever conceived, an entirely new vision of what the city could be.

It goes without saying that the vision was untenable. It’s not worth even arguing its merits, or complaining about Rudolph’s complicity in the evil of old-time urban renewal. His pragmatic acceptance of Robert Moses’s highway as a starting point is beside the point. I’m much more intrigued by Rudolph’s boldness, and his fascination with seeing the city as a system, a huge, interconnected web of physical structures and transportation modes, all of which he wanted to weave together into a beautiful object. Whatever else you can say about his plan, when you see the magnificent model of the Rudolph scheme that was painstakingly recreated by Cooper Union students over the past year—the model itself justifies a visit to this exhibition—the design of this huge thing exerts a powerful magnetic pull. Rudolph’s new city over the expressway is absolutely wonderful to look at, a lively composition of peaks and valleys that would have been an entire skyline in itself.

Paul Rudolph was a brilliant compositionalist, an architect whose greatest skill lay in making arrangements of shapes that were visually compelling. Yet he was fascinated by technology, determined to use it to the utmost, and he believed deeply in the potential of modernism, both in terms of architectural style and social attitude. He gets a bad rap when he is described as a maker of cold structures, indifferent to human use. The more you look at his work, the more you see that he was one of the last great romantics, truly convinced that human imagination was going to make the world better.

Paul Rudolph, Final rendering of the interior of the HUB including people mover, c. 1967-1972. Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
View of the HUB with mixed-use towers beyond. Photo by Barb Choit / The Irwin![#analytics: final]|||||| S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.
Paul Rudolph, Perspective rendering of vertical housing elements at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge, 1970. Brown ink on paper, 29 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

(Top image: View looking east toward the Williamsburg Bridge with Broome Street corridor in the foreground. Photo by Barb Choit / The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.)

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